from the nothing-to-it dept

It's been known for quite some time that the music charts are subject to being easily gamed. In fact, one of the reasons why the major labels are "the major labels" was they figured out quite early on how to best game the system. Still, it appears that one security researcher down under took a somewhat different route to "topping the charts" down in Australia. As sent in by G Thompson, a guy by the name Peter Fillmore made himself into quite a musician in a very short period of time. Forget "practice, practice, practice." Fillmore went a different route towards learning music and composing and recording his "songs."

Rather than spend years practising an instrument and writing songs, he compiled music from clunky electronic MIDI files and later by applying algorithms that squashed together public domain audio.

He then posted the tracks to a variety of different platforms via CDBaby, apparently including Spotify, Rdio, MOG (from Telstra), Pandora, iTunes and some others -- and then the fun part:

He then purchased three Amazon compute instances and wrote a simple bash script to simulate three listeners playing his songs 24 hours a day for a month.

This move apparently pushed the music up the charts on various systems -- hitting the very top of the Rdio chart for Australia. In response, he released a second album, and saw it jump to the second spot (behind his first album) within a matter of weeks. Any human listeners, not surprisingly, were not particularly happy, and he got flooded with bad reviews, but it didn't much matter. His favorite comment: "I call it troll music." There was also one that said: "it might sound good on cocaine like when it was made, but this isn't music." He did get a single iTunes purchase, though.

MOG and Spotify actually appeared to suspect something was up and cancelled certain accounts. Spotify killed the accounts he had set up to listen (but not the actual music accounts) though he's not entirely sure why -- though he suspects a few things that made it obvious they weren't legit (he didn't try that hard to cover his tracks). With MOG, he suspects it was because almost no one uses the service, so someone probably noticed the anomaly situation pretty quick. Rdio, however, kept the albums up at the top, and even sent out promotional emails to people pushing his albums.

At this point, he created a third album, called A Kim Jong Christmas, which was all just actual public domain music, so that if anyone listened to it, they wouldn't immediately realize it as "noise." As that one shot up the charts as well, users were confused, with one commenting: "There ain't no party like the Korean Worker's Party. But seriously -- what the hell is this doing on High Rotation?"

Of course, this was all done for the purpose of research. He was interested in a variety of things, including the fraud-checking on various music services, how royalties on these services work (he's got some data there as well) and various other things about how to make this kind of setup work. He also noted that when his accounts were suspended, almost no info was given, and he points out that this could also lead to a way for someone to attack a rival musician to get their works taken off of these services without warning or explanation.

The other question that I have is if Fillmore has opened himself up to any legal risk. It looks like he made about $1,000 in royalties, so I could potentially see some companies arguing it was a type of fraud. If he were in the US, I could even see some crazy CFAA charges thrown at him, because that's the sort of crap that happens in the US under the CFAA. Hopefully calmer minds prevail and this is viewed in the spirit it was done: as a research project which popped out some rather interesting results (and some really bad music).

from the time-to-step-up dept

Musician (Gang of Four) and marketing guru, Dave Allen, recently put up one of his insightful blog posts, questioning where the real disruption in online music is these days, and complaining that all of the services we see out there today are basically just "creating radio on the internet." And they're all almost identical.

The modern version of that is the wholesale commoditizing of music catalogs by the labels who create licensing deals with the streaming music services. Those actions in turn further homogenize the streaming music service systems as the services only have access to the same catalogs – there is no differentiation. Artists get pennies, or less than a penny, when someone streams their song, and the listener gets advertising in the stream unless they pay to escape the ads.

Music streaming on the web is not a Big Idea, it’s simply a lack of intellectual vision and thinking. Worse, it has advanced the “passive listening” experience. It’s just terrestrial radio dumped on to the web in other words – including advertising....

[....]

The bottom line is that there is no differentiation at the end of the day between Mog, Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody, and all the others too numerous to mention, if they all have the same music catologs – widgets and tactics don’t count.

I agree that we haven't yet seen all that much that's really innovative in music, but I'm not as worried about it as Dave. As I noted about the SF MusicTech conference (where Dave moderated a panel on exactly this subject), it really felt like we'd finally gotten past the doom and gloom and started looking at the real opportunities in the music business today. I think that much of the lack of innovation is because pretty much anyone who has really tried to innovate has been shot down by lawsuits. Seriously. The second you do something marginally innovative that starts getting attention, a major label comes up with an excuse to sue, mainly to regain some amount of control. So these clone music services are, in part, a reaction to all of that. The reason they all look the same is because they now know what it takes to fall into line and not get sued.

But I don't think that's a problem for the next wave of innovation in the space. Yes, many of these services effectively replicate radio on the internet today. But when you look through history, that often is the first wave of history when dealing with new media. You take the old media and move it to the new platform. It takes a generation or two before people start to recognize that the new media has special or different characteristics that really let you do something unique and new. Then it takes a little while before people start figuring out what that is. It's why I'm excited about things like Turntable.fm. Whether or not it's really the next generation offering that becomes a success story, it is a sign that people are finally starting to branch out and try things that are unique and different and really only possible on the medium of the internet.

In fact, while I'm a fan of Spotify and Pandora, since playing with Turntable.fm, I always feel sort of disappointed that I can't merge the three. Spotify has a huge collection, and I'd love to be able to move my playlists directly into Turntable.fm, or use Pandora's matching engine to find similar songs to what I'm playing or what others are playing within Turntable.

So I think we're just entering the very beginning phase of real innovation in the music service market space. The companies here today may or may not survive. Or maybe they'll drive the changes and come up with the next great innovations themselves. But it's still early in the game.

from the too-little-control dept

Well here we go again. There have been numerous attempts at music subscription services, and none have really done all that well. While some people do love their Rhapsody or Napster accounts -- neither has been a runaway success, and both struggle to get much attention these days. Yet, so many entrepreneurs believe it's a holy grail. So, here we go again. With plenty of people waiting for Spotify to enter the US market, the NY Times reports on two other new entrants; one from Mog -- who seems to have blasted press releases to everyone, with the general reaction being a big yawn and one from the founders of Kazaa and Skype, called Rdio. Neither sounds particularly compelling.

The problem with all of these subscription services is that they inherently need to have limits. You have to keep paying, you can't really share music with others, you may be able to take some of your music on the go, but it's usually a convoluted process. And that's a problem. Because people understand how mp3s work -- and that's without restrictions. Trying to get people to pay for a music experience with restrictions, that offers less than what they know can be done, is a recipe for failure. It's time to stop thinking of trying to "sell music" and start realizing how you can use music to sell something better.